Search Engine Optimization and What It Means To Your Site

Author: Shawn Hickman

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural", which would mean either organic or algorithmic, search results. Generally, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it ranks, the more searchers or web users will be enticed to visit that site. An SEO can also aim for different kinds of search types, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

For most small businesses, a search engine company may guarantee top rankings for keywords with a short or low monthly search volume or get rankings for higher volume keywords in smaller search engine sites that are not relevant and probably create a very minimal amount of search engine through traffic.

According to observers, currently there are really considered the main three search engines for businesses or firms to focus on their lead generation and keyword rankings through, and these are MSN, Google and Yahoo. With these three search engines combined, analysts say a firm could cover approximately 70% of all web traffic that could potentially come through their site.

The history of search engine optimization began when webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloguing the early web environment. At the beginning, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's private server, where a secondary program, also called an indexer, would extract an array of information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling probably at a later date. Currently, SEO's like jump2top and 7seo perform accurate searches or website visibility enhancement modes that are attuned to a company or organization's preferred objectives or desired reach.

The owners of most websites recognize that obtaining top search engine rankings for their top keywords is fundamentally important for their firm's continued success. However, the large majority of does not yet fully understand the process of a small business SEO company's process of achieving these keyword rankings through targeted search engine marketing and most are not aware of free SEO site appraisal. It is very important to not only invest in search engine optimization specialist techniques, but also pay-per-click management techniques also.

By 1997, the majority of search engines recognized that some webmasters were working double time in producing efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. Early search engine startups, such as Infoseek, fine-tuned their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords.

However, due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is a potential for an antagonistic relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference of the AIRWeb, or the Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was formed to confer and minimize the harmful effects of aggressive web content providers.


DCFirst Comments: Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very effective strategy for attracting potential patients to your clinic website. The first rule for SEO is relevant content on your website. On your first webpage (index page) include your clinic name, doctors name, city, state and zip code. These are terms that people will enter into a search engine when looking for a chiropractor in their town. Keywords that are a must on your first webpage are chiropractic, chiropractor or doctor of chiropractic. List your specialties: Gonstead technique, low back pain, spinal decompression, sports chiropractor, TMJ treatment... You get the idea, put your important words on the very first page. Who you are, where you are and what you do in just a few paragrapghs.

The best way to destroy your SEO strategy is to have your website designer use a flash introduction. This is like a short "movie" intro for your first page. Search engine programs called "spiders" search your pages for content, they may just pass over a flash introduction and never include your website in search engine results.

Keep It Simple. Most people will click onto the next search result if your website takes too long to open. Limit the amount and size of images on your webpages. Large images can slow the download time of a webpage. Easy to read navigation links to your other pages, limit bold and italisized words to just your keywords.

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